George Santayana

If artists and poets are unhappy it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

Before you contradict an old man my fair friend you should endeavour to understand him.

Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo The Last Puritan and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.

To knock a thing down especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle is a deep delight to the blood.

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions, their reasons are always different.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

The muffled syllables that Nature speaksFill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,She makes a sweeter music than is heard.

With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity.

Sanity is a madness put to good uses.

The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval

The man who is not permitted to own is owned.

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.